on computer science and media topics

Author: Patrick Kleindienst

The latest OpenVPN 2.4.3 release shipped with some technically minor changes which however might break your HdM VPN setup in Linux (should also apply to MS Windows and Mac OS) due to compatibility issues in terms of the OpenVPN config params currently in use. In case this problem affects you, here’s how to fix it (instructions assume Linux, but can be adopted for Windows and Mac).

You might have already heard of IBM’s artificial intelligence “Watson”, which beat two former champions of the american television game show “Jeopardy!” back in 2011. What you probably don’t know is that today lots of predefined Watson services are publicy available on IBM’s cloud platform “Bluemix”. These services cover different aspects of AI-backed applications like Visual Recognition, Language Translation or Text to Speech. This post glances on Natural Language Understanding, which is about analyzing text by extracting different kinds of information, and shows how this can be achieved by using Bluemix services.

In terms of security, obtaining Docker images from private or public Docker Registries is affected by the same issues as every software update system: It must be ensured that a client can always verify the publisher of the content and also that he or she actually got the latest version of the image. In order to provide its users with that guarantees, Docker ships with a feature called Docker Content Trust since version 1.8.
This third and last part of this series intends to give an overview of Docker Content Trust, which in fact combines different frameworks and tools, namely Notary and Docker Registry v2, into a rich and powerful feature set making Docker images more secure.

Now that we’ve understood the basics, this second part will cover the most relevant container threats, their possible impact as well as existent countermeasures. Beyond that, a short overview of the most important sources for container threats will be provided. I’m pretty sure you’re not counting on most of them. Want to know more?

When it comes to Docker, most of us immediately start thinking of current trends like Microservices, DevOps, fast deployment, or scalability. Without a doubt, Docker seems to hit the road towards establishing itself as the de-facto standard for lightweight application containers, shipping not only with lots of features and tools, but also great usability. However, another important topic is neglected very often: Security. Considering the rapid growth of potential threats for IT systems, security belongs to the crucial aspects that might decide about Docker (and generally containers) being widely and long-term adopted by software industry.
Therefore, this series of blog posts is about giving you an overview of the state of the art as far as container security (especially Docker) is concerned. But talking about that does not make so much sense without having a basic understanding of container technology in general. This is what I want to cover in this first part.
You may guessed right: Altogether, this will be some kind of longer read. So grab a coffee, sit down and let me take you on a whale ride through the universe of (Docker) containers.

Do you already have found time to recover from fighting the demons which made it hard to get a Docker cluster up and running on Raspberry Pis? Hopefully – because the next crusade lies ahead of us! So let’s dive into the next adventure, watching our heroes – three greenhorn students – on their search for their Intel NUC’s missing boot target.